Perception...

The lesson today revolved around the idea of perception. Perception is an undeniably essential element in the world of Marketing, Communications and Public Relations. Perception depends on a variety of factors such as nationality, religion, age, life experience and family values, to name but a few. It is vital for us to understand how to target all people’s commonplace perceptions and effectively make ourselves understood. In order to have hands-on, primary research, groups led experiments regarding different people/types of people and how they perceive routine objects when reliant on one sense. For example, a group allowed us to smell a variety of shampoos and asked us to deduct the brand from the smell alone. Possibly a superior experiment would have been to ask which smelt the most expensive, as the brands used were not universal. The experiment led by myself and Sallie was a taste test. Very simple, yet effective. We took a sample of people, half men, half women, one polish, one Portuguese, one Malawi and five British and produced 16 cups, 8 with diet coke samples and 8 with diet Pepsi samples and gave one of each to the contenders. the preconceived idea was that coke a highly favoured over Pepsi and 7 of the 8 were sure that Pepsi was coke and vice versa, basically, it was preferred. this was quite an unexpected result after the discussion where it was an adamant opinion that coke was more flavorsome. I suppose the effective advertising and marketing of coke is evidently subconsciously convincing people they prefer its brand. this is why I have to get my head around this perception thing... until next week... peace out... x